The Communicative Leader
On The Communicative Leader, we're making your work life what you want it to be. Do you need years of training or special equipment? Not at all my friends. Simple, yet thoughtful changes in your communication can make great strides in displaying your leadership ability. And why the heck should you care about leadership communication? Well, communication is the yardstick others use to determine whether or not they see you as a leader. Ahhh don't be scared, I got you. We will walk through common organizational obstacles and chat about small, but meaningful communication-rooted changes you can integrate immediately. No more waiting for the workplace to become what you hope it will. Nope. You, my friends, will be empowered and equipped to make those changes. Let's have some fun! Can't get enough?
Join our weekly email list to receive episode recaps, previews, and most importantly, communication-rooted solutions for your everyday workday questions and experiences. Sign up here: http://eepurl.com/h91B0v
We'd love to hear from you! Send us your questions and requests via email or a voice note to TheCommunicativeLeader@gmail.com.
The Communicative Leader
Unlocking Creativity Through Communication: Insights from Melissa Dinwiddie
Creativity isn't a magical talent bestowed on a lucky few—it's a skill that can be cultivated through deliberate practice, psychological safety, and effective communication. In this illuminating conversation, creativity expert Melissa Dinwiddie reveals how her unexpected journey from Juilliard-trained dancer to corporate innovation consultant led to transformative insights about unlocking creative potential in organizations.
Drawing from her work with companies like Google, Meta, and Salesforce, Melissa breaks down the often-invisible barriers that prevent teams from innovating: perfectionism, fear of judgment, and what she calls "expertise-induced blindness." She offers practical, playful solutions that any leader or team member can implement immediately, from simple check-in questions that spark curiosity to improv exercises that build psychological safety and collaboration.
The conversation dives deep into Melissa's "Create the Impossible" framework—Play Hard, Make Crap, Learn Fast—revealing how these deceptively simple principles can revolutionize how teams approach challenges. You'll discover why modeling imperfection might be a leader's most powerful tool and how transforming dry data into compelling stories can make information stick.
What makes this episode particularly valuable is Melissa's ability to translate abstract creative concepts into concrete workplace practices. Her "crappy doodles" exercise and time traveler activity demonstrate how playfulness can be strategically deployed to overcome communication barriers and foster innovation. For leaders struggling with teams that have brilliant insights but can't effectively spread them throughout the organization, Melissa's approaches offer a refreshing alternative to standard corporate communication training.
Whether you're a titled leader seeking to build a more innovative culture or an employee looking to flex your creative muscles, this conversation provides both the inspiration and practical tools to transform how you communicate and collaborate. Listen now to discover why creativity might be your most underutilized professional asset—and how to start developing it today.
Hey leader! Thanks for listening. For more leadership communication tips, check out https://www.thecommunicativeleader.com/
Hi and welcome to another episode of the Communicative Leader. I'm your host, Dr Leah OH, and today we're joined by Melissa Dinwiddie. Melissa is on a mission to help leaders and teams turn the impossible into reality by uncovering their creative potential. A Juilliard trained dancer, professional artist for 15 years, jazz singer-songwriter and performing improviser, melissa brings a wealth of creative experiences to her work, and she does this with companies like Google, meta and Salesforce. As the author of the Creative Sandbox Way, she's passionate about showing people how to embrace play, imperfection and experimentation as tools for innovation. Known for her engaging interactive keynotes and workshops, melissa empowers individuals and teams to unlock creativity, strengthen collaboration and thrive in the face of uncertainty. Melissa leaves us with thoughtful and easy-to-integrate activities to foster creativity, innovation and trust. Let's have some fun.
Dr. Leah OH:Hello and welcome to the Communicative Leader hosted by me, Dr Leah Omilion- Hodges. My friends call me Dr OH. I'm a professor of communication and a leadership communication expert. On the Communicative Leader we're working to make your work life what you want it to be. And the communicative leader we're working to make your work life what you want it to be. Melissa, welcome to the communicative leader. I'm really excited for our conversation today and, as we start, I was hoping you could share a bit about your journey in exploring the intersection of communication and creativity and maybe help us to understand how you became passionate about this link.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me and I'm happy to share my journey. It's kind of funny. My path into this work has been anything but linear. I actually started as a performer. I started as a Juilliard, trained dancer, and then a calligrapher and artist for 15 years, and also a singer songwriter. I performed, toured a bit as a singer songwriter. So there's a real thread running through all this creativity and also through everything that I've done, and also through everything that I've done actually communication. Whether it's dancing on stage, designing a document for people's weddings or leading a workshop, every single one is about really telling a story and connecting with people. And the big aha came when I realized that the same creative tools that I used in the arts, like improv, visual storytelling, even playful experimentation, could be transformational in the corporate world, especially when it came to how teams communicate. And that's when I really dove deep into helping organizations use creativity to supercharge their communication and unlock their innovation in the process.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, I love that, melissa, and I really appreciate the inspiration from all sources, because I think so often we get stuck in boxes and we're comfortable in these boxes, even if we don't quite like them. We know them. But certainly, like you were saying, you can see these clear threads of communication and creativity in all of these iterations and I love that you're bringing that into organizations.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah, I talk a lot. I talk in my keynote. At the beginning of my Create the Impossible keynote I invite people to think about the ways that each of us tends to get sort of stuck in boxes and they become the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. These kinds of moments in our lives happen often, starting in childhood. I tell a story right up at the front about when I was really young and I got stuck in a box. My own belief I mean, having heard me talk about the various different ways that I have been a creative people often find it hard to believe that I believed that I was a non-creative person for like 15 years. But we buy into these stories about ourselves and you know, humans just by nature have this way of wanting to put people into boxes. It's how we organize our world and you know this is how we survive in the world is wanting to create sort of safety and clarity, but none of us actually fits in boxes. Very neatly, yep.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly, and I love to when you're. I just made a note because they're thinking about organizations, thinking about being in teams.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Excuse me, there are the stories we tell ourselves about us and challenging to be innovative. Then, when we have these layers and layers of stories that many times aren't reflecting what's true Exactly, yeah, and so much of, I think our challenge, just as humans, is the ability to step outside of that, and I have what I refer to as my golden formula, which I I state in the in the way of a mathematical formula, which is self awareness plus self compassion equals the key to everything. Good, yeah, so first we have to have that self awareness piece you know, really understanding yourself, what you know, what works for you, what doesn't work for you, how you feel. You know just all of that, what's going on inside you. That's the self awareness piece.
Melissa Dinwiddie:And then the self compassion piece is self compassion is as defined by Dr Kristen Neff, who is the world's foremost expert on self compassion, and she has this amazing book called self compassion, and she divides it into three components, which is first mindfulness the ability to really step outside the distress and see what's going on, you know, from the outside. Mindfulness. And then an awareness of common humanity, that you're not the only person, the first person who's ever experienced whatever it is you're experiencing. And then the self kindness piece, and when you combine those two parts, the self awareness what's going on with you and the self compassion, really you know that really is the key to everything good.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, and I like that. I like that so much because so often, you know, we might have the first part, we might have some self-awareness, but we often forget the self-compassion part and we can show up and be compassionate for others, but a lot of times we don't do that for ourselves.
Dr. Leah OH:So I love that that's part of your equation. So let's think about the role of communication, effective communication and unlocking creativity, and I'm wondering, in your experience and we'll get to some of the work that you've done at Meta and maybe that gets fused in here but how does effective communication serve as a springboard or this catalyst for unlocking creativity in teams?
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah. So communication is really like a container for creativity. If you don't feel safe to speak up, to toss around a half-baked idea or to admit that you don't know something, well there goes your innovation potential. So a great example. I worked with a research team at Meta and they had these brilliant insights, but their internal communication was really stalling things out. So we used improv based techniques to help them build psychological safety and shift from siloed expertise to collaborative storytelling, and that really helped them enable you know, enable themselves to spread those insights around the organization so that they're not, you know, stuck, yeah, like if you can't spread the insights around, then it doesn't do any good. How brilliant they are right.
Dr. Leah OH:Yes, yeah, and I imagine too, especially when you're working with such technical experts in these silos. Jargon like the language doesn't always transfer, but I bet that improv based work that you've done everyone's drawing from a shared language, then, I would imagine, are more likely to. So can you kind of? Talk to us about what that might look like.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah, so well, the jargon is a big thing. That's one of the things that I help teams to sort of become more aware about and mindful of. These. You know, the research teams. This is a huge issue, for because they tend to come from the world of academia, they speak as sort of research ease and they're working in these cross functional teams. So the people, the other people in these cross functional teams, they don't speak research ease.
Melissa Dinwiddie:So I have some very specific activities to help them become more aware of how they might be speaking in a way, communicating in a way that's not helping them get their insights across and to understand that it's not because the their teammates or whoever their audience is, it's not that their audience is stupid or being difficult. It's that the person doing the communicating, it's their job to figure out what their audience's context is and to use an analogy that the audience is going to understand. Yes, yeah, and I have an activity called the time traveler. That I call the time traveler activity, where I pair people up and one person is from the present time and their partner is a time traveler from 500 years ago and the person from the present time has to explain what a cell phone is to their time traveling partner without the time traveler wanting to condemn them to burn at the stake as a witch.
Melissa Dinwiddie:It's an impossible exercise, but what it does is it really forces them to think from their partner's perspective and to use an analogy that their partner is going to understand and to use an analogy that their partner is going to understand. And when you take it to an extreme like that it really and do it in a game sort of a setting, you know it makes it fun. It's super challenging but it's fun. It gets people laughing and it really makes them think and it makes them work at it and then when they go out into the world they don't forget it. You know they have that experience in their memory. So that's an example of something that I might do.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, that seems like a phenomenal activity. So I was thinking, like you said, you're finding shared language, You're thinking about your audience, you are thinking about the situation and the context, and it's so helpful because you know the further, the more time we spend in the organization, the harder it is to remember what we didn't know. We didn't know when we began. I was even thinking when I'm you know, I'm talking I might be working with undergrads and then graduate students and then working with colleagues, and just all of that shifting that goes on in my language any day. Really helpful reminders.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yes, exactly, I run at the. I'm at the helm of a nonprofit organization that actually just recently filed our articles of incorporation as a public benefit nonprofit, which was back in 12 people in a living room and now we're 419 members and yeah, so we've grown, you know, incredibly fast. And I find myself I write these newsletters At the moment it's three times a week, now it's going down to two times a week because it's unsustainable at three times a week. But in any case, I find myself in whatever communications I'm writing. I find myself initially writing things like the comms team, and, and, and then stopping myself and saying you know, probably there are people who are not going to know what that means. So changing it to communications team so that more people are going to understand. You know, realizing, you know just little things like that. We have to be sensitive to the audience, because I know what comms team means, but not everybody else might think it's like an extracurricular sports team, right, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Leah OH:So let's think more about creativity. And I just love this, I think, because so often people think they have to check creativity at the door when they go into work because it feels different than this traditional way of communicating and connecting, and we know that's very limiting. And I'm wondering, with your work, melissa, what are some practical ways that either you coach leaders or that you've seen leaders start to kind of transform that culture so that it is one that's infused with creativity and teammates know they're safe to kind of throw those ideas that are a little bit left to center and they're not going to be laughed at.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Oh, my gosh, that is so huge. The very first thing that I would say is to model imperfection. This is so huge. If you're the leader and you only show up with polished solutions and you demand that from your people, then your team is going to learn. That only perfect ideas are welcome is the absolute opposite of what you need If you want creativity, if you want innovation. Also, get playful, and I mean that literally. Bring in improv games. Encourage visual thinking when we, you know we're so used to we go through school and we're so used to using one side of our brain to, you know, get very verbal, have people talk to each other, have people write all the time. These are really, you know, great skills that we develop. But it's almost like, you know, going to the gym and skipping leg day all the time and getting, you know, really beefy on top and having these really tweaky legs really beefy on top and having these really twiggy legs.
Melissa Dinwiddie:We want to encourage the side of our brain that that does things visually and, you know, give people an opportunity to literally sketch things out, make, do crap. I use an exercise called crappy doodles where I invite people to do. I call it a doodling because people get very intimidated by the idea of drawing. That's why I call them crappy doodles. Absolutely lower the bar. Lower the bar and with crappy doodles the rule is whatever you say, it is, that's what it is. So if you make a scribble and you say it's world peace, then it is, that's what it is. So if you make a scribble and you say it's world peace, then it is a world peace. If you make a scribble and then you say it's your perfect project plan, it's your perfect project plan, so things like that and then also normalize we don't know, yet that's really important and build rituals around curiosity. So I have a framework. It's my create the impossible framework and it has three steps that sound deceptively simple Play hard, make crap, learn fast.
Dr. Leah OH:Okay.
Melissa Dinwiddie:And it is a repeatable process that enables people to get past blocks and it invites all of this in a super approachable way, and that's what my flagship keynote is about. That's basically all the work that I do boils down to what I talk about in my create the impossible framework.
Dr. Leah OH:So yeah, oh, that's excellent. And I was thinking too when you were talking about, you know, leaders, integrating playfulness, even improv games, because then we're building rapport, we're maybe sharing some stuff about ourselves, you know, public or personal, not private, but just a way to have those connections to up the psychological safety. So it's like a win, win, win, win, win, right, anyway, you slice it.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yes, yes, this is one of the things that I love about being an improv practitioner and a play practitioner these activities, these tools that I bring in from the world of improv. They enable us to practice the very same skills that we need as leaders, as you name it, as humans. There's a reason why improvisers are known for being able to think on our feet, get up on stage and create a work product in a high stakes situation, in front of a paying quote, unquote customer, right In front of a paid audience. Because we practice the same skills that leaders need to practice uh, listening, you know, communication, um, collaboration, all the same skills that any team needs, all the same skills that any team needs. And so these are the activities that I bring in when I work with any kind of a team. A lot of them are from the world of improv.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, and that makes perfect sense. And I think on the surface people probably don't see or think of the parallels right away. But you're right, as soon as you kind of touch on some of these pillars you're like check, check.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah, that makes sense.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, so let's think more about communication and I'm wondering about barriers, and I know that I imagine you see some pretty common communication barriers that are acting as these hurdles to creativity and innovation. So I'm wondering what these barriers are and then kind of how you help leaders you know address and overcome these challenges.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest barriers that I see is perfectionism, which is a huge barrier to creativity as well Big barrier in communication. And another one, which is another barrier to creativity, is fear of judgment, very much aligned with perfectionism. They go hand in hand. And also, let's not forget, expertise induced blindness, which we were talking about earlier, when people get so deep into their own domain that they forget how to explain it to others.
Dr. Leah OH:They just can't remember how to do that anymore Exactly.
Melissa Dinwiddie:So one really playful fix that I use is to teach people to tell six word stories about their work. It really forces clarity, it invites metaphor and it sparks way more engaged conversation than any PowerPoint slide is ever going to do.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, that is really helpful. That's what I was thinking, Actually. That made me think when I started this podcast after I earned my promotion to full professor. So you know, years, over a decade of peer reviewed, you know, chatting with other leadership communication scholars, and I was like I have forgotten how to speak in any other way and I want to be able to help translate what we're doing here with the people who need it. You know, so I can completely identify with that like just getting stuck in there and forgetting. How do I explain this? This is.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah, yeah, and I often also with the teams that I work with, especially the ones who are highly, highly educated. I invite them to think about how would you explain it to your son or your daughter, or, if you don't have kids, just any eight year old? Yeah, who's not gonna speak in the same academic language that you speak in?
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly, yeah, it's so helpful. So let's think about collaboration, and in this one, I don't know, I imagine you have some people who maybe identify as creative, but then it's harder in a group. They don't know how to meld their creativity with others. I'm just wondering you know, what are your thoughts on collaboration and creative output in the workplace? And then the follow-up would be how do we bring in communication to kind of help make those connections more seamless or encourage those who might be a little more reticent?
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah, I am a huge believer in collaboration for any kind of creativity. You know, I know that there were some books that their own in the in the studio, the garrett loft right. The reality is that the most prolific creatives that you know these books have talked about and I I wish I could remember the authors of these studies, but they work in collaboration and that has been my experience as well, and I I definitely fell prey to this idea of oh and it also.
Dr. Leah OH:It also goes hand in hand with this idea of American individualism and the cowboy, I gotta to do it all by myself and be the impresario whatever.
Melissa Dinwiddie:I so fell prey to that. But my experience is that in running this nonprofit organization and anything that I have done in my life, when I have gotten together with other people and bounced ideas back and forth and worked together, that is when the richest ideas, the most just, brilliant creativity and innovation has come about. I think of collaboration, a lot like jazz. You've got structure, but the magic happens in the improvisation, in the listening, in the responding, the building off each other's riffs. And that only works with open, honest, respectful communication. And when teams build that muscle, then what happens is they stop competing for airtime and they start composing together, and that's when the really juicy ideas start to show up. So really, you know my work. When I come in and I work with teams, a lot of the communication work that I do is around helping them communicate for greater impact and influence. I'm not. I'm not the person to call when you've got like a communication issue problem between, like two people are having you know, conflict?
Melissa Dinwiddie:yeah, it's not, that's not my spot, it's it's. We have, you know, these brilliant insights but we're not able to spread them throughout the organization because we've got um, the, the, some of the issues that you and I just were talking about. You know, we're speaking in researches or jargon or whatever, and we don't have enough empathy about our audience and those kinds of issues. So that's when I'm brought in, but also internally in the, in the, in the team or throughout the organization, when people learn how to listen to each other and and you know, empathize with each other. These skills, you know they're so often referred to as soft skills, which I absolutely hate because they're human skills, they're a dental skill, they're as somebody else I know refers to them, as hardcore skills.
Melissa Dinwiddie:You know, that is when we develop these skills and really strengthen them. That is, you know, that's when we are able to collaborate really effectively and that's when creativity really thrives.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, I love that and creativity really thrives. Shy or just. They are such a linear, structured thinker. Improv or creativity just feels so far away from where they are. How do we get them to dip a toe?
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah. So here's an easy example. I think a lot in terms of how can you just shift the culture towards a little bit more playfulness, because people often sort of bulk at the idea of play. They think of it as the opposite of work I talk about. Play is not the opposite of work. Play is how we make work more effective and it's not a matter of like we're all going to go, I don't know, it's not a matter of like we're all going to go, I don't know. Play basketball instead of work. No, no, no, no.
Melissa Dinwiddie:We're going to shift how we approach work to make everything we do more playful. So just an example we want to bring more connection. When we connect, we communicate more effectively. When we communicate more effectively, everything is going to run more smoothly. Right? That's going to enable greater creativity.
Melissa Dinwiddie:That's going to have a moment, hopefully, when you're going to give people an opportunity to you know how you doing, whatever, instead of just going around the room and saying, dr Leah, how are you doing today? That's not necessarily the most, certainly not the most fun or playful, and it's not necessarily even the most effective, because asking someone how you're doing today is basically an invitation for them to say I'm fine, shut down, right, they just show their mask. But you could. This is a great opportunity for you to do something a little more fun and playful.
Melissa Dinwiddie:For example, you might say if you were, if how you are feeling today were a weather report, what would your weather report be? For example, I'm cloudy with a chance of showers, or I'm sunny with a few clouds, or you know, whatever your weather report is. So what that does is it shifts things just a hair and it invites a little bit of curiosity, a little bit of playfulness. So if you say I'm cloudy with a chance of showers, then I think, oh gee, I wonder what that means. I want to talk to Dr Leah after this and find out a little bit more. So you get to share what you feel comfortable with. You don't have to tell us anything that feels private, but you get to tell us how you're feeling without oversharing, and you get to invite curiosity. So that's just one tiny, small example of how you can turn that daily check-in into an opportunity for playfulness.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, I love that and you're right, I think even the person who just loves their research ease and that traditional approach, they can, you know, with time find some ways to express themselves and, I imagine, become a lot more comfortable with that as that habit continues.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Well, that's exactly the thing it's. If you are infusing these types of opportunities throughout the day, throughout the week, then it becomes part of your culture, and then people start to expect it and get used to it, and then that playful energy just becomes the norm.
Dr. Leah OH:Yep, it's the lens. I love that, melissa. Yeah, really powerful. So let's think about measuring success, because I imagine this is something that you're asked about when you're working with organizations, and this can also be kind of tricky too. I'm wondering what are some of these outcomes that organizations can look at? You know, too. I'm wondering what are some of these outcomes that organizations can look at, you know, when they're looking at either communication practices or creativity or innovation. How do you help organizations understand if things have moved in the direction they were hoping?
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah, I get this question periodically and I recently did an entire article for my newsletter. It's up on YouTube. You can find a whole video about this question periodically and I recently did an entire article for my newsletter. It's up on YouTube. You can find a whole video about this as well. Just on this very question of how to measure, and the first thing I would say is to look for qualitative shifts first. So, for example, are people sharing more ideas and meetings? Are your quiet geniuses speaking up more? Is feedback getting more constructive? And then track the ripple effects Are ideas getting greenlit faster? Are prototypes emerging earlier? Prototypes emerging earlier? So maybe you cut your initial review process by whatever percentage, because your communication got so much clearer and more aligned over time. So those are the kinds of things that you can start to look for. And again, if you're interested in some more ideas on that it was a couple of weeks ago, I think I did- a whole article on this.
Dr. Leah OH:That's really helpful. I'm going to look into that and I really like that idea of coaching for those qualitative changes behavior changes first, and then you can look and see with time what that looks like in more tangible ways. So let's think about storytelling. Listen, I know with your background and the work you're doing now that I'm sure storytelling is really infused into your approach to communication, to nurturing creativity and inspiring teams, and I was hoping you could help us see you know how you integrate storytelling in these areas you know how you integrate storytelling in these areas.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah, absolutely. Storytelling is how we humans make sense of complexity. If you want people to remember a concept, give it a story. If you want them to feel something about their work, give it a story. If you want to change behavior, you guessed it story. So I teach teams to turn dry data into narrative, because we all know we've all experienced dry data. Right, and what happens? It goes in one ear and out the other. What happens? It goes in one ear and out the other. So I teach them to use metaphor to explain abstract ideas and to find that hero's journey and their challenges. And suddenly that KPI report it's a quest. And that team failure it's the messy middle of a transformation arc. So those are the kinds of things that I do with storytelling, with teams.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, that's really helpful and I was thinking how empowering too, like you said, that messy, middle, hardest place to be, but looking at it as the arc and recognizing this is not the end, might be the little push. We need to keep going.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Yeah, absolutely I do. I tell that to myself all the time.
Dr. Leah OH:Exactly, yeah, so yeah, this is not the end. We're getting there. So, melissa, this has been such a fun conversation and I have two final questions for you and these. This is how we end all of our episodes of the communicative leader and these these two questions kind of work nicely together, and the first part is you know what is your tip, advice or challenge for our titled leaders out there? And then the second part is you know what do you want to leave employees of all ranks whether you know they're looking for a leadership role or they're just engaging in self leadershipadership what is the advice, tip or challenge for them?
Melissa Dinwiddie:I love these questions, all right. So first for leaders, for titled leaders, get comfortable not having the answer. Your job is to ask better questions and hold space for discovery. And also, please, play, and I'm serious about this. Play is the shortest path to trust, connection and innovation, yeah. So give space for that, yeah. And then for employees here's, um, here's what I will say is you don't need permission to be creative, you just need practice. So start with something small, maybe, uh, maybe, pull out a sticky note I think I've got one in here, I do. Pull out a sticky note and make a doodle. Maybe ask a what if? Question in a meeting, maybe a bold suggestion, even if it feels risky. Because here's the thing, creativity is a muscle and, just like a muscle, every rep counts.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, yeah, that is so helpful and I like how they're linked together right. The more that we're engaging in creativity, the easier it is for us to play, and I think, too, when you were talking about that, and the kids get this right, right, they understand the importance of play and and the way that they forge relationships so quickly on a playground and and the imaginations that they have that they can both be in this very strange and exciting abstract, imaginative world within, saying, like hi, do you want to play, do you want to be my friend? And we forget that and I love that. Your suggestions help us think about how to reclaim that in our work lives and our professional lives and that can infuse, you know, seep over into our personal lives and, I imagine, make that a lot more adaptable and flexible and fun as well.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Absolutely yes.
Dr. Leah OH:Yeah, melissa, thank you for joining us today on the Communicative Leader. This has been really so much fun. I've learned a lot. These are not areas that I think about a lot, and I know I'm going to start thinking about them much more often and integrating them, I think, even in my classes. So thank you.
Melissa Dinwiddie:Oh, thank you so much for having me, Dr Leah. This has been a lot of fun.
Dr. Leah OH:All right, my friends. That wraps up our conversation today. Until next time, communicate with intention and lead with purpose. I'm looking forward to chatting with you again soon. I'm the communicative leader.
